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Started by Lisbeth, October 19, 2007, 06:22:26 PM
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QuoteMessages from Childhood about Sex and Gender: An Autobiographical ExercisePurpose: This exercise is designed to encourage you to consider the messages about sex and gender you received during childhood and relate them to the theory and research in your text.Instructions: Consider important events or influences during your childhood that you feel influenced your gender identity development. Consider the messages you received about sex and gender from important people (for example, parents, teachers, peers, role models) or factors such as the media, the educational system, etc. Because there are considerable variations in gender-role socialization across social groups, consider as well the influence of any other salient factors (for example, your race or ethnicity, the historical-cultural period during which you grew up, your sexual orientation, etc.).
Quote from: Lori on October 19, 2007, 06:33:04 PMAny Ideas so far?
Quote from: Kiera on October 20, 2007, 04:24:37 AMI for one developed an independent, rebellious attitude that persists even to this day. The "establishment" is inherently bad and to me the girls always seemed to have more fun than the boys in busting the more traditional stereotypes & rules. HeHe - my two cents on the "historical-cultural period"! In summation I think I inherited most of my outlook on life from my mother who was one tough bird
Quote from: Suzie on October 20, 2007, 10:37:46 AMHave you considered "coming out" to the instructor? I bet she (assuming she is a she) would be very interested in your perspective.
Quote from: RAVENX on October 20, 2007, 12:12:57 PMsounds like my womens studies class. they had a big thing on transgendered people(the general opppinion of the class was presented) and i was wondering if anyone caught on and was staring at me. i did help one group out... and they were sortov curious why id kno so much... and i came out to my teacher... we're still friends. apparently she seemed like she knew since she said she sortov saw it in my writing and i was looking akward during the previous presentation . two pages...easy! four pages... tricky! but a final of 10+ pages with only 8 quotes allowed... i dont really kno how i did that one.
Quote from: Kiera on October 20, 2007, 04:24:37 AMPlease POST when complete (promise we'll be kind)
QuoteMessages from Childhood about Sex and GenderWhat kinds of messages from my childhood did I receive that are still affecting me today? When I was growing up, the signals I got about gender tended to be rather mixed. My parents did their gender pretty much within the accepted stereotypes they had grown up with, but they never tried to enforce those stereotypes on their children. Though my father went to work and came home and watched TV like a stereotypical male, he was of the liberal type who encouraged his children to follow their own dreams. As a consequence I felt pretty free about doing my gender however I wanted. I was never encouraged to play only with "gender-appropriate" toys that I can recall. Whether I played with dolls or Erector sets (or had the dolls use an Erector set to build a doll house), my parents said nothing. And with both an older brother and an older sister, I had plenty of both kinds of toys available.Still, I felt there were strong expectations by my mother that I should become everything I possibly could be. My mother told me more than once that I was the replacement for Linda, the infant girl she had lost to leukemia about eight or nine years before I was born. I have never really been able to connect to that claim before, but now I'm coming to understand that my mother wanted me to enact her unfulfilled dreams for her own life. She had never finished high school. She had run away from home (her mother) by getting married, yet she had never had a fulfilling life. I always knew that my mother was incredibly unhappy through all of the quilting and canning and whatever else she did to hide her depression, claiming to be a "tough old bird." The subliminal message of these expectations meant that I never felt that my mother would have been happy if my life had turned out like hers. She certainly was not happy with my sister because of that very thing. When my sister quit school and her job to get married, both my parents were disappointed. Of the three of us, my parents seemed to be happiest with me. I don't remember ever being told what big boys or big girls were supposed to be like. For example, I never heard my parents say boys shouldn't cry or girls should be passive. My sister said a few things, but we fought enough that whatever she said didn't have much authority with me. After I turned eight, my brother wasn't there to say anything. And being cut off by some 300 miles from our extended family, only my immediate family had much influence. What I do remember the most about explicit gender expectations came from my father through a couple of conversations I overheard between him and my sister. In one conversation he was complaining about the way she walked. He said she was swaying her hips in order to be provocative to boys. (After overhearing this I spent many hours practicing not swaying my hips, and it was many years before I loosened up enough to let them do their own thing again.) In another conversation they were talking about her returning to college for another year. He said he didn't want to pay for it if all she was going to school for was to find a husband. He said that if he was going to pay all that money, she had better graduate and make something out of her life besides just being a housewife. My father was kind of unusual that way. Perhaps it was from a couple of decades of lying in bed listening to my mother talk about how her life was a waste. I know they talked in bed away from us kids; I don't know what they said.In rural Iowa in the 1950s and 60s, tomboys were kind of the default expectation for girls, especially if they lived on a farm. You didn't wear fancy clothes to feed the chickens like my mother did when she was growing up. When I grew up we lived in town, but even there it wasn't much different, except for Sundays. Girls had to wear dresses on Sunday, and boys had to wear ties. Still even boys and girls from town would hire out to do corn detasseling every year. Blue jeans and long-sleeved shirts were often the uniform of the day. I heard plenty about sissies from kids in the neighborhood. They seemed to be the enforcers of masculinity. The main message was that only sissies cried when bullies beat them up. They were also the enforcers of gender binism, taking exception to kids when they weren't stereotypical enough to satisfy them.I don't know that I ever heard too much about lesbians or gay people when I was growing up, but they were whispered about a little. Never enough that you could actually learn anything useful, it was always just enough to know that there was something wrong with them. But there were bullies who were happy to let me know that I was "queer" and were ready to beat me up or do worse. My parents were believers in nonviolent passive resistance—a la Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was never encouraged to fight back when threatened, and the few times I allowed my frustration to get the better of me, I always came off the worse for fighting back. Thankfully, no one ever tried to rape me, but I hope in that case I would have gone down fighting, whatever my parents had taught me. I think my parents must have been afraid that I was homosexual. At least they seemed really relieved when I finally got married after waiting for many years. It never seemed to have crossed their minds that I might be bisexual. But that was a thing that was never talked about back then, and most people still don't understand bisexuality, so I'm not that surprised.Other kids often excluded me from their activities, but there were many games and recreational activities that I still participated in when I was allowed. There were, of course, the traditional swings, slides, and monkey bars of the play ground. We also played four-square and hop scotch. We would sit in the sandbox telling stories or digging in the sand. Later on we played marbles, which I became really good at. I never was coordinated enough to learn to jump rope. A lot of my time went into solitary activities like biking or playing with my dog. I still live on my bicycle when the weather is good. I always wished I could have gone horseback-riding, but that was way out of my family's financial league. I was too afraid of the water to learn to swim. When I was very small, my brother tried to teach me to fish. To my way of thinking, having a hook on the end of the line is a distinct disadvantage. If you catch something then you have to clean it.Everybody at school had to participate in physical education. I hated it because I was overweight and was always the worst at everything. That is, I was until I discovered basketball. My dad had put up a basketball hoop for my brother. I was the one who ended up using it. Of course that helped with my weight somewhat. It really helped with my coordination. But I never went out for the school teems, and it did not help me get a date for prom, or any other kind of date throughout high school. I sublimated it all by being a "brain" and practicing music. At various times I did both piano and guitar. I got my high school letter, but it was in choir. Other than basketball, I liked playing soccer, but I was only just okay. I was never good enough for people to really want me on their team. My teammates criticized me once for taking the ball the wrong way, but I did it to pass it to the goalie, and the coach said I did the right thing. I learned enough of the game to be a good "soccer mom" when I had my own kids and coached one season.I didn't really pay that much attention to television, other than cartoons, until the 1960s. A lot of those were pretty mindless, but one of my favorites was Johnny Quest. I always wanted to go on adventures like that, too. Of course, TV affected me in ways too numerous and subtle to call to mind. As an example, like many of my contemporaries, I dress in a modified "Mary Tyler Moore" style. During the 60s there was movement in the media toward greater social consciousness. Programs I particularly remember were Star Trek (where even a black woman could be an officer on a star ship, even if the captain was a womanizer) and All in the Family. In my family we were American Baptists, which meant that we belonged to the socially conscious, liberal wing of the Baptist church. Because of that I really hooked into the Civil Rights Movement and the Vietnam War protests. I would have joined Dr. King on his march on Washington if my parents had allowed it. Typical for the times, I always believed that anything "establishment" was inherently bad, and I read the sorts of books you might expect: The Strawberry Statement, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, The Pentagon Papers. Still, by the time I graduated from high school in 1971, I had learned from my mother not to directly confront power. Rather the effective way was to subvert it. Change comes slowly from within.The jobs I did at home were not selected for gender appropriateness. I did some of everything around the house. I started out sweeping and scrubbing floors and doing dishes. My mother didn't have to read The Feminine Mystique and wonder why she didn't have an orgasm from waxing the kitchen floor. I was usually the one in the kitchen with the Mop-N-Glo. My big jobs were cleaning the oven and the refrigerator. When I got old enough to run machines, my jobs included doing the laundry with the wringer washer, vacuuming, sewing, and mowing the lawn. I must not forget ironing either; I was the best in the family at getting crisp shirt cuffs and collars. I also shoveled sidewalks, did gardening, and helped with the cooking and baking. Some of my best memories of my mother are of baking bread with her. When we still had the big garden, I would take my turn pushing the hand-plow. And then there was always cleaning the bathroom. My father made an attempt to teach me some auto mechanics, but that was less than successful. The theory went down fine, but being confronted with a real, live engine was another thing. I have had mechanics laugh at my attempts at repairs.This "equal opportunity" approach to jobs was the basis of my career goals. When I was fairly young I got a hold of a book on amateur astronomy. From that point on I started devouring anything I could find on space and science. Soon I wanted to become a theoretical physicist specializing in cosmology—that is, when I didn't want to be a missionary, a journalist, a novelist, or a poet. Some of my writing got published in the high school newspaper. In school I tried not to get tracked into boys' vs. girls' classes; education, by its very nature, can be a subversive enterprise. I took both (girls') Typing and (boys') Bookkeeping. Both proved very useful when I ended up doing computer programming for a living, building accounting applications. After twenty-nine years of programming, today my goal is to become a therapist. This is in response to that side of me that wants to be in a helping profession, and being part of the LGBT community makes a career in church work somewhat problematic.I don't think any of these experiences directly influenced whether I view myself as male or female, or even as masculine or feminine. To my way of thinking, it is absurd to believe that having a career makes you masculine or that changing diapers makes you feminine. But my experiences have certainly affected how I have lived out my gender. I think the message I took with myself from childhood is that it's okay both to pursue feminine interests and to be successful at a career. I had permission to be whatever I wanted to be and follow whatever interest I wanted to follow. Masculinity and femininity are internal qualities of the personality—more in the drives of sacrificing and achieving, not the superficial behaviors that society claims to be gender. Of course, this means I have nearly spent myself dry, giving more and more to both career and family. Yet, I still I have to ask the question, "Who am I doing this for?" For all the self-sacrificing care giving I've done, I have to recognize that I'm still living partly for my mother. In The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan wrote, QuoteIn my generation, many of us knew that we did not want to be like our mothers, even when we loved them. We could not help but see their disappointment. Did we understand, or only resent, the sadness, the emptiness, that made them hold too fast to us, trying to live our lives, run our fathers' lives, spend their days shopping or yearning for things that never seemed to satisfy them, no matter how much money they cost? Strangely, many mothers who loved their daughters—and mine was one—did not want their daughters to grow up like them either. (p. 72, Norton paperback edition, 2001)There is the humorous saying, "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, I am my mother after all." My response has always been, "I'm not going to become my mother because I've always been my mother." But now that I understand these things things, I need to finally stop being my mother and become myself. There is tremendous irony in this understanding. For me to become less like my mother, a part of me has to become more like her. I have lived my own life, but I have always lived it for others, and resented every day of it. I have spent the last ten years dealing with that, and now I am ready to live for myself. I can now sense my mother's bitterness in stating that she was happy to raise me as a boy. It matched my own bitterness that I wasn't born a girl. Our bitterness is being resolved. I am now the girl she always wanted but wouldn't say she wanted. I am now the girl I always wanted to be. I am Lisbeth.
QuoteIn my generation, many of us knew that we did not want to be like our mothers, even when we loved them. We could not help but see their disappointment. Did we understand, or only resent, the sadness, the emptiness, that made them hold too fast to us, trying to live our lives, run our fathers' lives, spend their days shopping or yearning for things that never seemed to satisfy them, no matter how much money they cost? Strangely, many mothers who loved their daughters—and mine was one—did not want their daughters to grow up like them either. (p. 72, Norton paperback edition, 2001)
